I think one of the best way to undercut the spammers is to publish the exploits as soon as they’re discovered. The only people benefitting from the current arrangement are the spammers and Google; by not disclosing the exploits (and not closing them), it only fuels that market to find and sell the exploits to the highest bidder, and Google can take their time (which is to say, never) in addressing the issue. Google is also shielded from both embarrassment and accountability, since what the media and general public doesn’t know, doesn’t bother them. If everyone has the opportunity to cheat at the same price point (free, or nearly free), then it’s at least a fair market, and not one slanted so heavily toward the spammers.

In the past, a lot of effort and noise was made to tell Google, behind the scenes, what problems there were, in the hope that they would fix them. Of course, they never fixed the exploits, so it was wasted effort to try, as many did, to warn them in advance. The reality is is that it has to get much worse before it gets better. Today, locksmiths, tomorrow, your business model. Google has long ignored the local spam problem simply because they don’t want to be in the business of policing listings at the only level that is effective, which is humans ratting out other humans, and humans making a judgement as to the truth of the claims. The spam algorithms obviously don’t work and neither does the Local Data Quality team’s approach, which is more akin to the Zen saying, “Sit quietly, do nothing”. Although that may be the best approach to finding inner peace, it does nothing to end the outer spam war being waged in the Local indexes.

My question is, if you create and promote a marketplace with rules, and there’s no one to hold anyone accountable for breaking the rules, what is the point of having those rules?

I can’t doubt the man. He plays Google like a fiddle.

@Dan, yeah, but do you really feel good about having that kind of power in the hands of your competitors?

@Mike, Google took down the visible listings in your post, but there’s still more that they didn’t find. I found some (with some help)…But I’ll let Google see if they can find it themselves, since they’re so good at finding spam.

Also, if the Google spam team wants something to do, there’s locksmith spammers in Denver, CO, that need removal. Presently, 868 listings as of 6:34AM Mountain Time, and only 20 or so are legit. Is Google discerning enough to figure out which is which? We’ll see.

Finally, the engineers can work on fixing the bugs in the Maps and Google+Local reporting interfaces, which have been broken for months on end. SABs still error out when you press Edit details in G+L, and I’m not sure what to make of the ‘new’ Report a problem on Maps, since it’s another Googler singularity they recently opened up and has been steadily swallowing spam reports since.

Chop, chop!

Meant to say, they likely aren’t discoverable so probably won’t cause a problem.

But may be giving Maptivists some lingering satisfaction and I don’t understand why Google just didn’t take the + pages down too?

Very interesting conversation. I would think logically that it is in Google’s business interest to address these Places/Maps/Google+ SPAM issues, especially given the popularity of the Google Maps apps and the number of businesses and consumers that use it to locate businesses to patronize. Isn’t user experience the key to Google continued dominance and success? Each user encounter with a spam site means one less satisfied Google Maps user. Google Maps is one of the top mobile apps. It’s hard to believe that Google couldn’t make the case for investing in clean-up of these spam Places/Maps/Google+ local pages. What gives?

Google’s products, designed at authenticating business data, contain so many holes that frankly it becomes almost indefensible that Google actually cares about the quality of the data that they publish, and leads the informed observer to the conclusion that the company is concerned (at all costs) about getting an email address along with nicely delimited business data for outputting across their product range.

What’s more, if a company doesn’t actually register itself officially Google seems quite content to scrape and auto-generate listings from other providers and to create a mashup-listing from multiple sources that might or might not actually contain the right information (Just like they have been doing for artists and brands on YouTube so they can show their ads over copyrighted materials, deferred under a convenient UGC clause).

To the the case in question, this is set against a backdrop of companies that do provide accurate information and which are paid for by businesses such as Yellow Pages et al (Big G given a recent slap-down in EU regarding priority given to other directories).

Standing back and looking at this problem, it’s hardly a hack (remember recently the hotel listings “hijacked”, en masse) because there is no XSS and no trojans or weird installs – instead, as usual, it’s simply people exploiting a submission and verification process that anyone with half a brain could game after they had done it once.

The fact of the matter is that the number of people affected by this hack (who knows how many people have been tricked or abused indirectly by fake business listings) is impossible to gauge, while policy makers and governments do not seem to have the technical know-how or the desire to assess the impact that such a lax system could have for it’s citizens.

So the same s*** continues on a different day.

At least for Google, consumer ignorance is bliss: most users don’t know that the first 3 listings on Google are paid (nothing to do with the fact that Google chose a background colour for their ads that would render invisible on a large proportion of screens, but because users actually know very little), while Google can cream money with various tweaks to their Adwords system – whether it negating the use of exact match keywords because they are considered “low volume” or removing the ability to opt-out completely of mobile ads and then hiding these control mechanisms right down in the Adwords interface.

No, you can’t stand back and say that there is anything other than money at work, and we’ve all been documenting this stuff for years and no-one seems to care.

I expect to read about more “hacks” in the future.

G.